The NIMH Community Support Program: Pilot Approach to a Needed Social Reform*

Abstract

This year, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) launched a modest but potentially significant pilot program titled Community Support Program (CSP). CSP is designed to improve services for one particularly vulnerable population—adult psychiatric patients whose disabilities are severe and persistent but for whom long-term skilled or semiskilled nursing care is inappropriate. Specifically, CSP involves contracts (not grants) between NIMH and State mental health agencies, many of whom will subcontract with local agencies for demonstration projects. To date, 19 States have been awarded CSP contracts amounting to a total of approximately $3.5 million for first year's activities. Although program is so new that little has been published about it, interpretations are beginning to appear in press and professional literature. The New York Times (February 7, 1978), for example, while emphasizing need for Federal leadership to improve services to chronic patients, referred to CSP initiative in an editorial as belatedly pulled together and meager. Professional literature has viewed it more positively. A recent article in Scientific American (Bassuk and Gerson 1978, p. 53), for example, highlighted importance of program in the acknowledgment of specific needs of chronic severely disabled person, and the willingness of Federal government to accept more responsibility for mentally ill. The APA Monitor (Herbert 1977, p. 4)